Her leg jerked forward and her knee struck the crumbling wall sharply enough that she knew she’d cut it, but no matter: She furiously shimmied the rest of her body through the window.
She had the halo. She was free.
But there was no way she had enough air in her lungs to make it to the surface. Her body was shaking badly, her legs barely responding to commands to swim, and a haze of black-red spots swarmed before her eyes.
She felt dull, like she was swimming through wet cement.
Then something amazing happened: The dark waters around her grew bright with a shimmery glow, and she was enveloped in warmth and light like summer dawn.
A hand appeared, extended toward her.
Daniel. She slipped the fingers of one hand inside his strong broad palm, hugging the halo close to her chest with the other hand.
Luce closed her eyes as she flew with Daniel upward, in underwater sky.
A second seemed to pass and they broke through the surface into blindingly bright sunlight. Instinctively, Luce gulped for the biggest lungful of air she could take in, startling herself with the raw groan her throat made, one hand around her neck to guide the air down, the other ripping off her goggles.
But—it was weird. Her body didn’t seem to need as much air as her mind told her it did. She felt dizzy, struck dumb by the sudden shocking sunlight, but strangely, she wasn’t on the verge of blacking out. Had she not been down there as long as she thought she had? Was she suddenly that much better at holding her breath? Luce let a surge of athletic pride complement her relief at having survived.
Daniel’s hands found hers underwater. “Are you all right?”
“What happened to you?” she cried. “I almost—”
“Luce,” he warned. “Shhh.”
His fingers traced over hers and wordlessly relieved her of the halo. She didn’t realize how heavy that thing was until she was free of it. But why was Daniel acting so strangely, slipping the halo away from her so stealthily, as if he had something to hide?
All she had to do was follow his dark violet gaze.
When Daniel had swum her swiftly to the surface, they had broken through in a different place than they’d entered. Where before, Luce realized, they’d seen the sunken cathedral from the front—just the twin green-gray spires rising from their sunken towers—now they were almost precisely above the center of the church, where the nave would once have been.
Now they were flanked by two longs rows of flying buttresses, which would once have held up the now-crumbling stone walls of the long nave of the church.
The arched buttresses were black with moss and weren’t nearly as tall as the spires of the façade. Their slanted stone tops broke through the surface of the water—which made them perfect benches for the group of twenty-odd Outcasts presently surrounding Luce and Daniel.
When Luce recognized them—a field of tan trench coats, pale skin, dead eyes—she stifled a gasp.
“Hello,” one said.
It wasn’t Phil, the smarmy Outcast who’d posed as Shelby’s boyfriend, then led a battle against the angels in Luce’s parents’ backyard. She didn’t see his face among the Outcasts, just a troop of blank and listless creatures she didn’t recognize and didn’t care to get to know.
Fallen angels who couldn’t make up their minds, the Outcasts were in some ways the opposite of Daniel, who refused to take any side but Luce’s. Shunned by Heaven for their indecisiveness, struck blind by Hell to everything but the dimmest glow of souls, the Outcasts made a sickening assembly. They were staring at Luce the way they had the last time, through ghastly, vacant eyes that could not see her body yet sensed something in her soul that said she was “the price.”
Luce felt exposed, trapped. The Outcasts’ leers made the water colder. Daniel swam nearer, and she felt the brush of something smooth against her back. He had unfurled his wings in the water.
“You would be ill-advised to attempt escape,” an Outcast behind Luce droned, as if sensing the stirring of Daniel’s wings under the water. “One glance behind you should convince you of our superior numbers, and it only takes one of these.” He parted his trench coat to reveal a sheath of silver starshots.
The Outcasts had them surrounded, perched on the stone remains of a sunken Venetian island. They looked haughty, seedy, with their trench coats knotted at their waists, concealing their dirty, toilet paper–thin wings.
Luce remembered from the battle in her parents’ backyard that the female Outcasts were just as callous and remorseless as the males. That had been only a few days earlier, but it felt like years had passed.
“But if you’d prefer to test us . . .” Lazily, the Outcast nocked an arrow, and Daniel could not completely mask his shudder.
“Silence.” One of the Outcasts rose to stand on the buttress. He was not wearing a trench coat, but a long gray robe, and Luce gasped when he reached up to pull back the hood and exposed his pallid face. He was the pale chanting man from the cathedral. He’d been watching her the whole time, hearing everything she said to the priest. He must have followed her here. His colorless lips curled into a smile.
“So,” he growled. “She has found her halo.”
“This is no business of yours,” Daniel shouted, but Luce could hear the desperation in his voice. She still didn’t know why, but the Outcasts were intent on making Luce their business. They believed she held some sway over their redemption, their return to Heaven, but their logic eluded her now just as much as it had in her parents’ backyard.
“Do not insult us with your lies,” the robed Outcast boomed. “We know what you seek, and you know our mission is to stop you.”
“You’re not thinking clearly,” Daniel said. “You’re not seeing this for what it is. Even you cannot want—”
“Lucifer to rewrite history?” The Outcast’s white eyes bore into the space between him and Luce. “Oh yes, in fact, we would like that very much.”
“How can you say that? Everything—the world, our very selves as we know them now—will be annihilated.
The entire universe, all consciousness, gone.”
“Do you really think our lives these last six thousand years are something worth preserving?” The leader’s eyes narrowed. “Better to wipe us out. Better to erase this blind existence before we begin to fade. Next time . . .” Again he trained his sightless eyes in Luce’s direction. She watched them swivel in their sockets, zeroing in on her soul. And it burned. “Next time we will not incur Heaven’s wrath in such a senseless way.
We will be welcomed back by the Throne. We will play our cards more wisely.” His blind gaze lingered on Luce’s soul. He smiled. “Next time we will have . . .help.”
“You’ll have nothing, just as you do now. Step aside, Outcast. This war is bigger than you.” The robed Outcast fingered a starshot and smiled. “It would be so very easy to kill you now.”
“A host of angels is already fighting for Lucinda. We will stop Lucifer, and when we do and there is time to deal with pettiness like yourselves, the Outcasts will regret this moment, along with everything you’ve done since the Fall.”
“In the next go-’round, the Outcasts will make the girl our focus from the beginning. We will charm her, as you have done. We will make her believe every word we say, as you have done. We have studied your ways. We know what to do.”
“Fools!” Daniel shouted. “You think you’ll be any smarter or more valiant next time? You think you’ll remember this moment, this conversation, this brilliant plan at all? You’ll do nothing but make the same mistakes you made this time. We all will. Only Lucifer will remember his previous errors. And his pursuits serve only his base desires. Surely you recall what his soul looks like,” Daniel said pointedly, “even if you see nothing else.”